The Future of Horror

by Jonathan Oliver

  When he decided against buying the next day’s Mail, Ray realised he did not want to know anything about the night before. He avoided television too and left the radio switched off for three entire weeks. By avoiding all local news, he felt he had not been involved in what might have happened to the cyclist. By the end of his self-imposed news blackout, he was nearly certain that only the cyclist’s knee had, in fact, been grazed by his car. The kid must have quickly turned his bicycle onto the pavement, which is why he had vanished from Ray’s rear view of the road. Ray told himself this so many times he almost believed it was the truth.

  Three weeks after the incident, and long after the paint job on his car had dried, Ray was compelled to return to Rocky Lane on his way to a fare at Alexandra Stadium. There was still a great mound of flowers at the roadside at more or less the same place he had met the cyclist so unexpectedly.

  When Ray made an offhand mention of the flowers on Rocky Lane at the taxi rank on Colmore Row, as he fiddled with his phone, he learned from another driver that he had indeed killed a teenager, who had been riding a mountain bike to the Hamstead chip shop, without a helmet or lights. The other driver wasn’t sure, but didn’t think there were any witnesses. “Fucking cyclists,” they’d both agreed, and rolled their eyes knowingly.

  Ray had never again driven along Rocky Lane and still circumnavigated that entire estate if ever asked to pick-up or drop-off close to it. He’d also arrived at the conclusion that if we vividly remembered the misery of every cold, cut, and bruise, in anticipation of the next illness or misfortune, we would all go mad. Or we would all become inactive and unable to function. The ability to forget was a kind of advance braking system of the mind, and the effectiveness of his own surprised him.

  So did the mad have perfect recall, or the ability to imagine the full horror of the consequences of existence? Now there is a thought, Ray thought, and turned into the street to pick up his next fare.

  Ray had never made a pickup from this area of North Birmingham, and was unaware there were even houses standing in the area where Hockley became Aston and the Jewellery Quarter. The area was close to the city centre and remained a labyrinth of closed redbrick warehouses, revived industrial estates, hole-in-the-wall commercial interests attached to broader industries, interspersed with cash and carries, mostly closed retail units, developments of unsold flats, barely functioning churches and one or two old school Midlands pubs. But his satnav brought him to a small settlement of houses attached to a wall of Victorian red brick that had once been home to a local industry; the houses were opposite a patch of waste ground used for storing white commercial vans.

  The residential side of the street was typical of a Midlands terraced row; permanently in shadow, slouched at the curb as unappealingly as a group of scruffy labourers stood in line for something soul destroying and poorly paid. This street had somehow escaped clearances, Luftwaffe bombs and gentrification.

  The eight terraced houses also looked as though they had shuffled back from the road, as if they didn’t want to meet the eye of any passing motorist. Their dark, traffic-grimed windows and peeling window frames didn’t give much away about their interiors, and Ray would have guessed, at a glance, that they were unoccupied. From the rear of one of the properties, dirty black smoke rose into the sky suggesting a bonfire.

  The man who came out of the terraced house numbered 129 came out with a smile that Ray found disproportionate to the prompt arrival of a taxi at his address. He wasn’t wearing a coat, and his feet looked too big for the pair of brown slippers he wore, which was odd because it was raining.

  The tiny front garden of 129 was a wreck; filled with sodden cardboard boxes containing bottles, rusting tins, what looked like garden waste, and a kind of bracken that sprouted so high it obscured the ground floor sash window.

  The call from the controller listed this address, the name John, and a landline phone number. “Wants taking to various places” was the only instruction. Beside the last piece of information, it was an ordinary enough job.

  Ray watched the grinning elderly man make his way to the driver’s side window.

  “Afternoon!” the man said, and then looked at a sky glooming towards a rainy dusk.

  Ray nodded, and looked about the man’s person as if querying the lack of a jacket. “John, is it?”

  “She’ll be out soon,” John said.

  Perhaps the tatty bastard in slippers was not the passenger. Ray hoped so; he disliked the man’s half-smiling face. Unless they were attractive and female, or it was an airport fare, Ray found it hard not to greet every passenger with an attitude of weary, surly impatience. He didn’t particularly like this about his customer service, but he couldn’t help it. It is what working from seven until eleven did to those who provided a service to the general public.

  Behind the thick spectacle’s lenses John’s eyes were alight with excitement. “I’ll need a hand with her.” He seemed surprised that Ray didn’t share his enthusiasm for the task.

  Not a fucking wheelchair.

  “You’ve a very special passenger this evening. You’re going all over. But she’ll look after you eventually.” The man winked to embellish this tantalising suggestion of a generous tip.

  “Where to first, mate?” Ray climbed out of the car and wanted to hurry up the overgrown path to the house to escape the rain, which didn’t bother John at all. “How many places does she want to go?”

  The man stopped and in a show of exuberance spread his arms wide as if to indicate vastness. “She knows where to take us. Where to start and where to finish.”

  Ray took a second desultory inspection of the elderly man’s grey slacks, which looked to have once belonged to a suit, and were now held above his navel by a white plastic belt. A diamond patterned pullover was tucked into the waistband of the trousers. An oddball with an elderly relative, and the fare would probably be paid out of a mobility allowance. But he would have preferred clarification on both the destinations of the journey and an assurance that this man had enough money to pay for it. He adopted a quizzical facial expression as he waited for the man in the slippers to catch up with him on the front path.

  “Yes, yes, she’s in there, waiting.” The man said, misreading Ray’s yearning for reassurance, while jabbing a stubby forefinger, yellowed with nicotine, at a black doorway. The man’s pullover stank of sweat. The front of his trousers were greasy.

  Even now, Ray still came across pockets of the world that hadn’t changed and that reminded him of old films. This was one of them. And for good or ill, he knew houses were like people. Just as you never really know what goes on behind a face, you also have no idea what a home really looks like behind the façade.

  “Takes me time to get her up. Taken me an age this year,” John said. “But she is raring to go now, I can tell you. And a lot of people are waiting for us.”

  Ray didn’t ask what they were waiting for, because he wasn’t interested and had already decided to keep conversation to a minimum. Just get the job done. He wondered if his disgust at the living conditions inside the house were obvious, but then realised that he didn’t care if they were.

  The house was cold and smelled of old bin bags and gas. And something else, like the odour that gathers around thunderstorms, which was stronger than the underlying smells of gas and waste.

  One ceiling light was on in a rear room of the house and all of the curtains were drawn. What yellowy illumination existed was sufficient to indicate that John hadn’t taken the rubbish out of his dismal home in a while.

  Following the shabby figure, Ray saw that a narrow track had been made in the living room, fashioned between bulging rubbish sacks and cardboard boxes packed with what looked like old clothes. Perhaps the man was in the rag trade.

  Ray peered inside a box. A little girl’s dress and a pair of brown sandals were placed on top of other clothes inside pink plastic bags. The evidence of juvenilia in the man’s house inspired Ray to look about a bit more carefull
y. He peered into a second box and was relieved to see an adult man’s suede coat, a pair of broken glasses and some scuffed shoes.

  The second room may once have been intended as a dining room, though any indication of the room’s former function had been obliterated by what looked a collection of every free paper printed in Birmingham within the old man’s lifetime.

  “I’ll get her out the kitchen,” John said.

  The entrance from the dining room to the kitchen was missing a door, and through the doorway Ray glimpsed a dark silhouette, as small as a child, soundlessly turn away from a counter before slipping deeper into the unlit kitchen. John vanished into the darkness as if in pursuit, but never switched on the light.

  While John messed around in the kitchen out of sight, Ray peered about the dining room. In the background, he heard the old man say, “Your carriage awaits, your Highness.”

  Ray thought about taking a picture of the room on his mobile phone for the other drivers at the coffee stand, but his anxiety about not being paid swamped any other inclination or thought. “Alright in there?” he asked the darkness. “Minimum fare is a fiver, mate.”

  “Yes. Yes. Why wouldn’t it be? A lot of preparation has gone into this evening, so we don’t want any snags. And you’ll do a lot better than a fiver too, driver. You will be justly compensated.” This was said from inside the unlit kitchen with a tinge of sarcasm that made Ray suffer a sight disorientation at the man’s tone.

  “Ain’t me that’s not ready,” he fired into the darkness. There was no reply.

  A series of framed pictures on the dining room wall, half concealed by a bale of newspapers, caught Ray’s eye. There were two framed photographs of a middle-aged woman; the second picture featured John, though better dressed and well-groomed than he was now, sat beside the woman at what looked like a table in a restaurant. Dead wife, Ray thought without a trace of emotion. It was hard to see what the middle picture depicted, a painting that gave nothing away beside an impression of black smoke billowing up from something that burned in the section of the picture that was concealed. The smoke moved across a grey sky.

  John returned from the kitchen wearing an anorak, with the hood pulled tight around his face, which made him look imbecilic. Held in his arms, the lid tucked beneath his chin, was a cane-work laundry basket painted yellow. “If you get the other side, I think we can manage.” The lid was secured to the bottom with green gardener’s twine.

  “What is...?” Ray started to ask, but didn’t know how to finish.

  “It’s all I’ve got that’s big enough. And it will suffice. Now, you must drive very carefully, you understand? I hope that was explained to you.”

  “We going to the laundrette?”

  What he’d suggested was offensive enough for the elderly man’s face to darken with rage, before he said, “Just get the other side!”

  Ray soon felt like he was carrying the entire weight of the heavy basket on his back, while John muttered instructions – “Be careful. Careful! That’s it. Careful” – as they picked a path through the rubbish on the floor. Whatever was inside the basket was also living. Maybe some kind of animal. Ray felt it skittering around inside the cane basket; perhaps seeking a way out, or a stable surface, in the way animals do in transit. Probably a dog. Was that what he had seen in the kitchen? A dog?

  “This a rare breed or something, mate?”

  “You have no idea of her value.”

  “Ain’t you got no cage?”

  John ignored the question.

  Outside at the car, after much fussing, the old man clipped himself and the wicker basket into respective seat belts in the rear of Ray’s car, which quickly filled with the odour of the old man’s sweat. Ray climbed into the driving seat and cracked a window.

  “Please close that, in case she... it’s cold out, you know,” his passenger said.

  Ray sighed and started the car. “Where to, mate?”

  “I have the first address.”

  “Let’s have it.”

  The first three digits of the post code, B20, indicated Handsworth Wood, a mostly affluent Sikh area. And the satnav quickly found Somerset Road, a place Ray was familiar with; a long, quiet road flanked by large Victorian houses.

  “A vets, is it? Or you breeding her or what?” Ray asked, while eyeing the cheap, yellow basket in the rear view mirror. “Sure you ain’t got one of them carry cases? Can’t be very comfortable for the animal. Dog, is it?”

  The old man sat close to the basket and rested one arm across the front as if to protect the cargo if the car should stop suddenly. He said nothing to Ray and seemed content to grin at the rear view mirror in a way that started to make Ray feel uncomfortable.

  “What is it?” Ray repeated.

  The man’s mouth loosened into a sneer. “Maybe you had better just continue with the role you have been assigned, driver.” The way he said driver was oddly formal, and old fashioned, but not without a trace of condescension either.

  “Some manners never go amiss, mate.”

  “We don’t want to be late.”

  Ray wound his window down further and pulled away from the curb.

  AFTER RAY HAD helped John and his laundry basket up to the front door of their destination, and then returned to his car to wait a good ten minutes for another passenger that John had told him to wait for at the same address, he’d begun to smell smoke.

  Peering through the passenger side window, Ray watched a thick plume of black smoke billow over the roof of the house that John had gone inside, and drift into the sky. The fire must have been burning in the rear garden. Over the sound of his radio, Ray was also sure he heard a short, sharp human cry issue from the rear of the property. But the scream was immediately followed and muffled by the laughter of a large group of people.

  “Not the weather for a barbecue,” he said, in an attempt at humour and as a tactic for drawing out some information from his new passenger, when she eventually shuffled down to his car. “Lot of smoke back there. What’s it, bonfire? Festival, like?”

  The ancient Indian woman in the rear never answered him. Once she and her Samsonite suitcase had been installed into the rear of the vehicle, she had merely passed a piece of paper between the seats. Printed in capitals was an address Ray recognised in Handsworth, near the park. He wouldn’t need the satnav.

  As Ray pulled away, he glanced through the passenger side window so he could see into the space between the house and the equally vast neighbouring property. The sound of laughter and applause coming from the back garden continued. The scream must have been part of some Asian festival or tradition. The people who had initially crowded about the front door to welcome John and his laundry basket were all well-heeled Sikhs, as Ray had expected them to be. Though their smiles and greetings were warmer and more excitable than he’d thought possible for the arrival of a little scruffy man and his pet inside a laundry basket.

  During the journey to Handsworth Park, the elderly Asian woman never looked up from staring at her withered hands that she held together on her lap. Bonfire smoke had caught in the folds of her Sari. Ray was struck with the notion that she didn’t like him.

  After Ray parked outside the large semi-detached Victorian house, across the road from Handsworth Park, that the old Indian woman had requested, an expectant middle-aged white couple appeared in the doorway before Ray had applied the handbrake. They came into the street to help the thin, elderly Indian woman out of Ray’s taxi.

  The couple looked alternative yet fashionable. Ray recognised the type, who had begun migrating into what had been an Asian and West Indian neighbourhood because the big houses and long gardens were half the price of houses in Moseley and Kings Heath. Two older children, both boys with long hair, skipped around the Indian woman’s case as if Father Christmas had arrived.

  The mother held a toddler in her arms and, without looking Ray in the eye, said, “We need you to take another passenger. She’ll be out shortly.” She handed a twenty po
und note through the window.

  When Ray slipped a hand inside his jacket pocket to find fifteen pounds change, she said, “No, no, keep it.”

  “You sure?” Ray said. “Only a fiver’s fare.”

  “We need you to hang on for a few minutes. You know, keep the meter running.”

  Ray shrugged. “No problem at all. You need a hand with that case?”

  But the woman had already turned away and Ray could see her husband raising the Samsonite case over the threshold of the house with the help of his eldest son. The husband never looked at Ray either. The elderly woman was already inside; she had been in a hurry to get off the street.

  More perplexed than he could remember being about his work for some time, Ray waited fifteen minutes for the next passenger to come out of the house. And while he waited, he heard another desperate wail, that he guessed was human, shoot up from the rear of the property he was parked outside. The cry was cut short by the burst of a firework, that howled and shatter-sprinkled above his car.

  Ray climbed out of his car and looked at the sky. The firework had already dispersed into the cold black air. But he could smell smoke. Wood smoke and meat cooking.

  The door to the house that he’d delivered the elderly Indian woman to opened and shut quickly behind another elderly woman with a tartan shopping trolley on little wheels. Her association with the family was almost as incongruous as that of the elderly Asian woman he had dropped off at the address. Maybe the new passenger was a cleaner and the family wanted Ray to drop her home now that the party had started and her work was done. There was lots of laughter and applause and excitable shrieking coming from the children at the rear of the house now. Someone shouted, “I don’t believe it!”

  The woman who had come out of the house stood on the doorstep and pointed at the shopping trolley. “Give us a hand, please, driver.”

  Ray went and collected the trolley. The top of the trolley was tightly secured with the elasticated cords used to fix objects on the roof racks of cars. The trolley was heavy and Ray was certain that as he raised it, something had flopped or fallen against one side of the case, then kicked itself upright. “Party they’s having, is it?” he asked his new passenger.